The Gazebo

An amiable black comedy, adapted from Alec Coppel's play, in which Ford plays a TV writer-director, on the verge of the big time (a script commission from Hitchcock), who decides in desperation to murder the blackmailer who is bleeding him white over an amorous indiscretion, afterwards disposing of the body under the gazebo being erected in the garden. It's much too long and leisurely, needlessly incorporating a routine song-and-dance number for Reynolds (as Ford's showbiz wife), and belabouring the plot to show that Ford didn't actually kill anyone. But the central sequence in which Ford (excellent throughout) nervously executes his perfect murder, only to find everything going wrong except the murder itself, is hilarious, and perfectly capped by a call from Hitchcock to ask how his script is coming on, whereupon the despairing Ford asks the Maestro how he would solve the dilemma of a killer with a body to bury and no shovel to do it with. Nice supporting cast, too.